Tip: Create an SEO Checklist
Continuing a recent theme of design process-based articles, we arrive at Seach Engine Optimization.
Most non-technical people, which is about 90% of the populous and probably 99% of the people who pay you, consider the Internet to be basically Google. It means a lot to them when they can find their site in search engines. I’ve seen people get very excited over it. Therefore, it’s worth making sure that their sites will attain a decent ranking.
SEO is something that every web designer or developer has to (or should) deal with at some point, often to their dismay. There are many resources on this, ranging from the this handy SEO cheat sheet to this comprehensive article on Google Search Ranking Factors, both of which are from the extremely smart people at SEOmoz. You may also like Google’s official SEO Starter Guide. However, I find it very useful indeed to have a concise checklist of the minimal SEO tasks that I like to complete on every site I send out.
You can download a copy of my SEO checklist (pdf), featuring the following and more in printable form. It goes something like this:
Before Upload
- Title Tags
- On every page
- Unique and descriptive
- Contain site name & key words for that page
- Less than 70 characters
- Meta Tags
- Description: Unique and accurate
- Charset
- Author
- Keywords
- Body Content
- Each page has a keyworded, relevant H1 tag
- Each page has useful outgoing links
- Key words are put in strong tags, where applicable
- Check for repeat content (Especially on CMS-based sites). This is a big no-no for Google
- View the site in Lynx to get a real picture of what Google will see, and correct any major errors.
After Upload
- Add the site to Google Webmaster Tools
- Upload an XML Sitemap to GWT
- Submit the site to DMOZ
- Get the site in Google by linking to it from my portfolio and/or from Twitter
Having a process at the ready for doing basic SEO tasks will make the process as painless as it’s going to get. Ensuring that your clients’ sites get index will go a long way towards generating goodwill and enhancing your reputation (hopefully your wallet, too).